Serial killer trivia.

Fifty serial killer trivia questions in six rounds, from the nicknames and the arrests to the forensics, the films and the numbers. Every answer is checked against at least two independent sources, listed at the bottom of the page. Where the sources disagree on a date or a count, the answer says so or leaves the number out rather than guessing.

The answers are hidden: read the question, make your guess, then tap Answer. It works on your own, and it works as a quiz night: read each round aloud and keep score. Every case here is either closed with a conviction or a guilty plea, or is a famous historical case where no suspect is named.

Round 1: names and nicknames

1. Where did the name “Jack the Ripper” first appear?

   Answer

   In the “Dear Boss” letter, dated 25 September 1888, which the Central News Agency in London received on 27 September and passed to Scotland Yard. Many historians think the letter was a hoax, possibly written by a journalist.

2. With what words did the Bay Area killer first call himself “the Zodiac”?

   Answer

   “This is the Zodiac speaking.” The line opened a letter to a San Francisco paper in August 1969. The Zodiac case file has the full sequence of letters.

3. What does “BTK” stand for, and who came up with it?

   Answer

   “Bind, torture, kill.” Dennis Rader invented the name himself and used it in his letters to police and the press.

4. Who coined the name “Golden State Killer”?

   Answer

   The writer Michelle McNamara, in a 2013 Los Angeles Magazine article. Before that the offender was known as the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker.

5. Which newspaper named Richard Ramirez the “Night Stalker”, and what had he been called before?

   Answer

   The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, in 1985. Before that he was the “Valley Intruder”; “Walk-In Killer” was also in use.

6. What was the name of John Wayne Gacy's clown character?

   Answer

   Pogo the Clown. He also performed as a second clown, Patches, at charity events and children's parties, which is where the nickname “Killer Clown” came from.

7. Which killer was known as the “Monster of the Andes”?

   Answer

   Pedro Alonso López. He was arrested in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1980 and given Ecuador's maximum sentence of 16 years. He was released on 31 August 1994 and his whereabouts are unknown. (Sources disagree sharply on how many murders he was actually convicted of, so we leave the number out.)

8. Which Colombian killer was nicknamed “La Bestia”, the Beast?

   Answer

   Luis Alfredo Garavito. He was arrested in April 1999 and died in prison in Valledupar in October 2023.

9. Which English poisoner was called the “Teacup Poisoner”?

   Answer

   Graham Young. In 1971 he poisoned his workmates at John Hadland Laboratories in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, mainly with thallium, and was convicted on 29 June 1972. His case file tells the whole story, including why he had already been released once.

Round 2: how they were caught

10. What piece of computer media led police to the BTK killer in 2005?

    Answer

    A floppy disk. Rader mailed it to KSAS-TV in Wichita on 16 February 2005. A deleted Word file on it carried the metadata “Christ Lutheran Church” and a last editor named “Dennis”. He was arrested on 25 February 2005.

11. What everyday piece of paperwork led to the arrest of David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam”?

    Answer

    A parking ticket. His car was ticketed beside a fire hydrant near the scene of the 31 July 1977 shooting in Brooklyn. He was arrested outside his apartment in Yonkers on 10 August 1977 with a .44-calibre revolver.

12. Who caught the Night Stalker on 31 August 1985?

    Answer

    Residents of East Los Angeles. They recognised Richard Ramirez from his photograph in the newspapers and held him on Hubbard Street in Boyle Heights until police arrived.

13. What plumbing call-out exposed Dennis Nilsen in February 1983?

    Answer

    A blocked drain at 23 Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, London. A Dyno-Rod engineer found human remains in it on 8 February 1983, and Nilsen was arrested the next day.

14. Why did Sheffield police stop Peter Sutcliffe's car on 2 January 1981?

    Answer

    It had false number plates. He went on to confess to being the Yorkshire Ripper.

15. Whose disappearance in December 1978 made John Wayne Gacy a suspect?

    Answer

    Robert Piest, 15, who vanished on 11 December 1978 after leaving a Des Plaines pharmacy to talk to Gacy about a job. Gacy was arrested on 21 December.

16. What clue on an envelope led detectives to Albert Fish in 1934?

    Answer

    The emblem of the New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association on a letter he sent to the Budd family. Detective William King traced the stationery to a Manhattan rooming house and arrested Fish on 13 December 1934.

17. How many times did Ted Bundy escape from custody in Colorado in 1977?

    Answer

    Twice. On 7 June he jumped from a second-floor window of the courthouse law library in Aspen. On 30 December he cut through the ceiling of his cell in the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs and walked out. He was recaptured in Pensacola, Florida, on 15 February 1978. The Bundy timeline has every date.

18. What forged document led to Harold Shipman's arrest in 1998?

    Answer

    The will of his patient Kathleen Grundy, who died on 24 June 1998. It left her estate to Shipman. Her daughter, a solicitor, went to the police, and her exhumed body contained diamorphine.

19. What did a Yuba City peach farmer notice in May 1971 that led to Juan Corona?

    Answer

    A freshly dug hole in his orchard. The bodies of 25 farm workers were eventually recovered from orchards along the Feather River. The Corona case file names the victims.

Round 3: forensics and firsts

20. Who coined the term “serial killer”?

    Answer

    No single person. The Berlin detective Ernst Gennat called Peter Kürten a Serienmörder in 1930; “serial murderer” appears in English in Webster's Third (1961) and in John Brophy's The Meaning of Murder (1966). The FBI agent Robert Ressler popularised “serial killer” after a 1974 lecture in England, and he is the one usually credited.

21. How does the FBI define serial murder today?

    Answer

    “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” The definition came out of a 2005 FBI symposium in San Antonio and was published in 2008. It lowered the older threshold from three victims to two.

22. Which technique identified the Golden State Killer in April 2018?

    Answer

    Investigative genetic genealogy. Crime-scene DNA was uploaded to the public site GEDmatch, and family trees built from distant relatives pointed to Joseph James DeAngelo. Police then collected his DNA from things he threw away. He was arrested on 24 April 2018.

23. Who was the first murderer convicted using DNA fingerprinting?

    Answer

    Colin Pitchfork, in January 1988, for the murders of two 15-year-old girls in Leicestershire in 1983 and 1986. The method was developed by Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, and the same tests had first cleared the original suspect.

24. How did police finally tie Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, to his victims in 2001?

    Answer

    By retesting a saliva sample taken from him in 1987 with better DNA technology. He was arrested on 30 November 2001.

25. How was “Wearside Jack”, the hoaxer who derailed the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, finally identified?

    Answer

    By DNA from the gum on one of his envelopes, which matched a sample taken after an unrelated arrest in 2001. John Humble had sent the hoax letters in 1978–79 and a tape in June 1979. In 2006 he was sentenced to eight years for perverting the course of justice.

26. In the CDC study of a San Antonio children's ICU in 1981–82, how much more likely was a child to die when nurse Genene Jones was on shift?

    Answer

    About ten times: the study put the relative risk at 10.7 for a death and 25.5 for a cardiac or respiratory arrest. Staff called her 3-to-11 evening shift the “Death Shift”. The Genene Jones case file explains the study and the trials.

27. Who cracked the Zodiac's first cipher, the 408, and when?

    Answer

    Donald and Bettye Harden, a schoolteacher and his wife from Salinas, California, within about a week of its publication in August 1969. It did not reveal a name.

28. Who solved the Zodiac's 340 cipher, and when?

    Answer

    Three private citizens: David Oranchak, an American software developer; Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician; and Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian programmer. They sent the solution to the FBI on 5 December 2020, 51 years after the cipher was mailed, and the FBI confirmed it that month.

Round 4: on screen and in print

29. Which real Wisconsin murderer inspired Norman Bates, Leatherface and Buffalo Bill?

    Answer

    Ed Gein of Plainfield, Wisconsin, arrested on 16 November 1957. He fed into Norman Bates through Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, into Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and into Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

30. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs borrows from which three real killers?

    Answer

    Ed Gein (the skin suit), Ted Bundy (the fake arm cast used to lure victims) and Gary Heidnik (the pit in the basement).

31. Which actress won an Oscar for playing Aileen Wuornos, and in which film?

    Answer

    Charlize Theron, for Monster (2003). She won Best Actress at the Academy Awards on 29 February 2004. The Wuornos case file covers the real case.

32. The Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) is based on which book?

    Answer

    Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, the memoir of former FBI agent John E. Douglas, written with Mark Olshaker.

33. In Fritz Lang's film M (1931), Inspector Karl Lohmann was modelled on which real Berlin detective?

    Answer

    Ernst Gennat, the Berlin homicide chief who worked on the Peter Kürten case. The film is often said to be about Kürten, but it drew on several cases and Lang himself denied a direct link.

34. Which book about the hunt for the Golden State Killer was published in 2018, after its author's death?

    Answer

    I'll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara. It came out in 2018, a few months before DeAngelo's arrest.

35. Was H. H. Holmes's “Murder Castle” in Chicago really a hotel full of death traps?

    Answer

    Largely no. The building at 63rd and Wallace in Englewood had shops downstairs and apartments above. The “castle” and its torture chambers came from the yellow press of the 1890s. Holmes confessed to 27 murders, but some of his “victims” turned out to be alive; historians accept about nine.

Round 5: law and aftermath

36. What is a “Son of Sam law”, and which state passed the first one?

    Answer

    A law that stops criminals from profiting from books or films about their crimes, sending the money to victims instead. New York passed the first in 1977, after the David Berkowitz case.

37. Which 1991 Supreme Court case struck down New York's original Son of Sam law, and which book was at issue?

    Answer

    Simon & Schuster v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, decided 8–0 on 10 December 1991. The book was Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, later filmed as Goodfellas. The Court held that the law violated the First Amendment; New York passed a revised version in 1992.

38. To how many murders did Gary Ridgway plead guilty in 2003 to avoid the death penalty?

    Answer

    48, on 5 November 2003, in exchange for leading investigators to remains. He was sentenced on 18 December 2003 to 48 consecutive life terms without parole, and added a 49th conviction in February 2011.

39. What sentence did a Milwaukee judge give Jeffrey Dahmer on 17 February 1992?

    Answer

    Fifteen consecutive life terms. A sixteenth followed in Ohio later in 1992 for his first murder, committed in 1978.

40. What was H. H. Holmes actually convicted of, and how did he die?

    Answer

    The murder of his accomplice Benjamin Pitezel, in Philadelphia, not any killing in Chicago. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on 7 May 1896.

41. When was Aileen Wuornos executed?

    Answer

    On 9 October 2002, by lethal injection at Florida State Prison.

42. Why did Texas prosecutors reopen the Genene Jones case in 2017?

    Answer

    Under a 1977 Texas good-conduct law she was due for mandatory release in March 2018. They brought new murder charges, and in January 2020 she pleaded guilty to the 1981 murder of 11-month-old Joshua Sawyer and was sentenced to life.

43. What happened to Juan Corona's first conviction?

    Answer

    An appeals court overturned it in 1978 because his defence had been incompetent. He was convicted of all 25 murders again at a retrial in 1982 and died in prison on 4 March 2019.

Round 6: the numbers

44. How many patients did the Shipman Inquiry conclude Harold Shipman had killed?

    Answer

    Its first report, in July 2002, found at least 215. Its final report, in January 2005, put the total at about 250, of whom 218 were identified. He was convicted of only 15 murders, at Preston Crown Court on 31 January 2000.

45. Name the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper.

    Answer

    Mary Ann Nichols (31 August 1888), Annie Chapman (8 September), Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (both 30 September) and Mary Jane Kelly (9 November), all in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. No one was ever charged.

46. How many murders is the Zodiac confirmed to have committed?

    Answer

    Five, in Northern California in 1968–69, with two more victims surviving. In a 1974 letter he claimed 37. The case is still open.

47. Of how many murders was Andrei Chikatilo convicted, and when was he executed?

    Answer

    Fifty-two. He was sentenced in October 1992 and executed by shooting on 14 February 1994.

48. Of how many murders was John Wayne Gacy convicted?

    Answer

    Thirty-three, at the time the most in US legal history. He was sentenced to death on 13 March 1980 and executed on 10 May 1994 at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois.

49. How many life sentences did Dennis Rader receive?

    Answer

    Ten consecutive life sentences, after pleading guilty to ten murders on 27 June 2005.

50. How was the Golden State Killer sentenced?

    Answer

    To multiple consecutive life terms without parole, on 21 August 2020, after pleading guilty on 29 June 2020 to 13 counts of first-degree murder. He had once been a police officer in Exeter, California. (Sources disagree on the exact number of life terms, so we leave it out.)

Scoring

• 40–50: you have read the case files, not just watched the documentaries.
• 25–39: a solid true crime fan.
• Under 25: nothing wrong with that: the answers are all above, with their sources.

More trivia, on paper

If you liked this, the same kind of questions fill two of our books, alongside puzzles and a pocket fact book. They are made for the table, not the screen: pencil, coffee, a friend to argue with.

---

Questions people ask

Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Serial killerWikipedia
2. Excerpt from The Serial Killer Files (Harold Schechter)Library of Congress
3. The origin of the term “serial killer”Psychology Today, 2014
4. The “Dear Boss” lettersHistory UK
5. Zodiac KillerBiography.com
6. Report on the 340 cipher solutionThe Register, 12 December 2020
7. How the cops caught BTKABA Journal
8. Michelle McNamara and the Golden State KillerBiography.com
9. Golden State Killer sentenced to life without paroleNBC News, August 2020
10. How the Herald Examiner named the Night StalkerLA Observed, 2013
11. Los Angeles residents capture the Night StalkerHistory.com, This Day in History
12. Pedro Alonso LópezBiography.com
13. Colombian serial killer “the Beast” diesFox News, October 2023
14. Graham YoungBiography.com
15. Son of Sam murder case timelineBiography.com
16. Dennis NilsenBiography.com
17. How the Yorkshire Ripper's reign endedABC News (Australia), January 2026
18. Albert FishAlcatraz East Crime Museum
19. Ted Bundy's escapes from custodyABC News
20. Juan Corona dead at 85KQED, 2019
21. Juan Corona diesCBS Sacramento, 2019
22. Visible Proofs: Alec Jeffreys and DNA fingerprintingUS National Library of Medicine
23. Green River Killer: Gary RidgwayHistoryLink.org, Essay 4262
24. Ridgway arrestedHistoryLink.org, Essay 3648
25. Wearside Jack dies aged 63Police Professional
26. Prosecutors race to keep “Angel of Death” behind barsProPublica
27. Ed GeinBiography.com
28. Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs)Wikipedia
29. Charlize Theron, Best Actress acceptance speechAcademy Awards Acceptance Speech Database
30. The book behind Netflix's MindhunterTIME, 2017
31. M (1931)Turner Classic Movies
32. Ernst GennatWikipedia
33. H. H. HolmesWikipedia
34. Simon & Schuster v. Members of the N.Y. State Crime Victims Board, 502 U.S. 105Cornell Law School, LII
35. Simon & Schuster v. Crime Victims BoardFree Speech Center, Middle Tennessee State University
36. Dahmer sentenced to 15 consecutive life termsDeseret News, 17 February 1992
37. Shipman inquiry: at least 215 patientsBMJ, July 2002
38. Shipman inquiry final reportBMJ, February 2005
39. British doctor murdered at least 215CBS News, 2002
40. Russian mass murderer executedUPI, 15 February 1994
41. Jack the RipperWikipedia
42. John Wayne GacyWikipedia
43. Dennis RaderWikipedia